Letter 27 - the tiles in Ataturk Airport

Dear boys,                                                                                          02/21/14 cont’d.
 

                                                                              (me, 1989, Quebec)

                So I’ve played Solitaire and been angry for the past hour. Not anger at leaving – anger at things I want to leave that I feel I can’t get away from. I can’t avoid it now; I left Niger a long time ago. I’ve been haunted not by Niger or by some “Niger version of me,” but by the things about myself that haven’t changed since I lived in Niger: my feelings of inadequacy… helplessness… unbelonging… disownership.

                I have wanted desperately to feel like I belonged somewhere all of my life. I thought that I could belong to a culture or social group if I grew into the role they projected on me. I thought I could belong in my own skin if I grew into the person I wanted to be. That is why I was conflicted. In between my own impossible dreams and the seemingly-unattainable expectations I sensed from well-meaning people – sometimes even our parents – I simply couldn’t be enough. In Niger I felt branded as “outsider” by my skin color and education. I thought this meant that I belonged in America. In America I became known for my oblivion of slang, mores and norms, basic cultural awareness, and perspective. I told myself this meant that I belonged in Niger. But now – the floor of the Istanbul airport feels like exactly the right place for me – I feel that my orphanness comes from being unable to live or think or love or grow roots the way anybody expects me to. It seems to put others off that I’m not what they expect. I feel lacking because I can’t meet their expectations, and out of place because I am lacking.

I think all my life I have been telling myself that if I was better at being something I would be the somebody it took to feel like I belonged somewhere.  What was I going to be? I was going to be this girl that everyone, including myself, saw as adequate. She was about 5’7” and she weighed 130 pounds and it wasn’t all on her butt. She didn’t wear glasses and she had brown eyes and light brown skin and wavy hair two times as thick as mine and flawless skin and she ran marathons because she was always in great shape, but her beauty was all internal and although she turned heads all the time everyone knew she was completely modest. Her sense of style was impeccable and her makeup was always Covergirl-worthy, but she spent all her money on human need projects and didn’t make others envious. She spoke five or six languages fluently (which meant she knew American slang too) but she didn’t let others know this so they wouldn’t feel that she was unrelatable or smarter than girls should be. And she was a surgeon and also a mom and homeschooled her kids long enough that her parents and their homeschooling friends weren’t at all in askance when she sent her kids to attend school in another language. She married the alpha male of alpha males who was also the Ken-Doll guy every other girl wanted and the man whom every other guy said was most likely to become chair of the United Nations, and he was sweet and sensitive and artsy and super in shape and very involved in their kids’ lives and very assertive but didn’t demand her to “obey” or “submit” to him. She stayed home enough but she still had a high-power career and traveled the world for business. She always knew what to say and she always said what she wanted to say. She was an acknowledged leader at everything she did but somehow she was also a “submissive” wife. She and her husband were leaders at their church and worked in discipleship and everyone acknowledged that she had lived up to the stereotype for good missionary kids. And her family lived overseas but they owned a home and developed a strong social network and picked a “home culture” to move their kids back to by age 12 so that they could avoid the teenage intercultural angst that their mom had managed to get over in her early twenties.

I don’t think anybody can ever keep up with all the expectations of one subculture – let alone one culture – and trying to combine the expectations of multiple cultures when these are frequently in conflict with each other is simply torment. I’ve lived my life among swirling expectations: how to be the best version of me, how to find a place to belong, how to carve out a niche, how to use what I’ve been given. How to take all this mystery and put it in drawers or boxes or pages.  And I’ve lived among swirling definitions – what it means to be me, what it means to be adequate, what it means to be best – when the words neither sounded nor meant the same in any of the languages I spoke. I've had them forced on me and I have searched for them desperately. There are good reasons to define and expect. It makes it easier to dissect conflicts, communicate desires, remind oneself of one’s limitations. But it is so easy to be lost in or to abuse a system. When we can’t classify someone, it’s easier to dismiss them than to create acceptance in our world for them. When we can classify someone, we like to make them useful to us, improve them, put them somewhere decorative. The “bests” are endless: a billion ways to self-fulfill and/or meet needs, or reverse it and be fulfilled and have your needs met (although then non-majority Westerners will call you selfish, and majority Westerners will call you independent and attempt to use you).

Even now I live my life in these lines.  That may not be bad, but what is bad is that I think and feel my life in these lines. I offer myself to my church and my church plugs me into their needs. I go to work and my patients drain the life out of me while – sometimes even literally – asking me to affirm to them that this existence on the fringe of sucking existential black holes is fulfilling for me. I ask myself how to be a better member of our family. Friends and the media remind me of all the ways I must be true to myself. And yet I come home some days and all I want to do is nothing. Nothing for me, nothing for nobody.

Because I don’t want to be classified. I don’t want to be measured. I want to redeem my sense of obligation. I want to discover what my existence would mean if we peeled away the things people get from me or I get from myself and put it on a shelf and looked at the entity of it, the naked raw truth of it that is sitting next to me on the floor of the Istanbul terminal, shivering from something more than cold.  At my core, I just want to be loved and accepted not as the “daughter of Niger” or the straight-A-honors-student or the resident assistant or the teen staff supervisor or the nurse or the translator or what Galmi needs to train their staff or the intended helpmeet or the flirt or the absurdly liberal conservative or the TCK or the Sunday school teacher, but as Tabitha.

I can’t be unique in this. Everybody is looking for an identity, but not the one, not in the way that we search and are helped to search for it. We don’t ultimately crave a Kingdom or a Phylum as much as we crave a name that belongs to me, that is loved as it stands and not if it could get somewhere else or attain a different accentuation or mean something with six decimals instead of three or be followed by a few more letters. What if we gave each other meaningful names and treasured them, not because we associated the name with a drug store or a song or a handout, but because it was inherently beautiful that a name could conjure up a mystery? That would be enough for each of us, wouldn’t it? That love of mystery would solve a lot of our puzzles and heal a lot of our hurts.

                That is really why I went back to Africa.  I came back to Africa to leave her so that when I said my name I could stop hearing her voice like a keening in it. What part of me was she, or did I muddle names with hers when I lost her involuntarily? I came to recognize what I call motherhood about African goyo so that I could see where else I have been mothered. Maybe I could recognize commonalities between the place I was raised and the place that bore me. Or maybe I would find that beyond biological mama and nanny, there will be an adoptive home too. I want to make room for other homes by fully leaving the ones I have had. You don’t know a pet belongs to you until you let it run away. The place it finally runs to is the place it calls home.

 I thought I had lost me, but after my trip to Niger, I don’t think I ever had her. I know my American friends are hoping I learn to love their country. I know my African friends want me to come back. I suspect that the missionary community had a set of needs and meanings picked out for me before I ever visited.  I am warmed by the love I sense in all their hope and desire. I just want to escape the sense of conditionality I’m carrying around with me. Collectivism tells me I am a part of a group. Individualism tells me to forge my own path. Missionaries tell me I was created for a ministry. The secular world tells me to find myself outside religion. Religion tells me to walk a certain pathway and develop identity in association with something that transcends myself. They create a beautiful shell that me could live in, and all these imaginary pearls I could form, but what about the oyster? What about her? Is she too raw and pulpy, too plain and dirt-flecked, too overshadowed by shell or pearls, for us to recognize her?

What if I extract myself from all these well-meant hopes and expectations? That is what I really want. I believe in obedience to God, and I believe in love to others, but I don’t believe in obligation except to God. I’ve been made the knower of mysteries angels don’t even have access to, I am created in the image of God, I am woman who was the essential remaining part of creation  (not the addendum or the facilitator of man’s role), I share every moment in the global communion of breathing. So why can’t I stand as tall and hold my head as high as all these things that alone truly describe or define me or demand of me?

And I believe in “Here am I, Lord, send me,” but more than that, I believe that “here I am” implies an I, an ownership of what the I contains, and a separation from surroundings. Not a “here am I with my paraphernalia and my citizenship and my heritage, pack us up and send us rolling.” Paraphernalia tends to get caught on things, as I am ruefully rediscovering while lugging my over-filled sport bag around the Istanbul airport. What if I have to open myself to own and be freed of the definitions and needs and chains and blessings of the past before I can offer myself up to do anything?  What if I have to receive a name that stands by itself, to center myself in a before-God-apart-from-etcetera here, before I can claim anyone has “called my name”?  Would it make any sense to ask for an individuality free of individualism, a collectivity that collects only what the name carries?

If I abandon all of the “logical” reasons I ought to belong anywhere – would some kind of innate homing instinct kick in? What if I claim the freedom to leave unmet needs that I am capable of meeting? What if I could do cultural brokerage, could found a nursing school, could become a doctor, could be a great wife – but I walk away from them and do something I look less suited for because that’s what I find I want?  I want the freedom to not answer to terms, systems, or definitions even if it would be convenient to place me in them. Introvert? Extrovert? Heck, I live outside that. Spontaneous? Planned? Not worth my time to pick one. Woman? Yes, but not based on anyone’s book or criteria for desirability. Gender roles? Race? Class? Political party? Don’t waste my time with systems or shortcuts. Let’s stop slapping labels and categories and algorithms on living. I’ll grant a basic assumption for religion because that is what faith is and faith runs more essential than any proof. But let’s honestly talk about what being living universal human really means, how we practically live out love and equal respect for each other, how we abandon the prejudices we associate with our interpretations of biology or style of self-expression.  (That’s not to say abandon Biblical principles. But not to slap the label “Biblical” on our preferred personal or cultural interpretation. Take the time to ponder what we’re calling true, and more importantly, why.)

                My favorite Bible book is Genesis. I identify with the patriarchs, with Abraham homeless and disappointed wandering under the mocking stars, with Isaac bewildered by his expectations for his sons, with Jacob desperately wrestling with God in the night. “I will not let go until You bless me,” he gasps, although he has already been blessed when he bargained the birthright away from his brother, tricked his father’s fumbling hands, out-savvied his uncle. But he wrestles God all night because he realizes that something is still missing. And when it all comes down, God doesn’t say, “What else do you want?” because they both know what Jacob wants. Jacob wants his own name. Even his name sits oppressively on his shoulders – the one who is born pulling on his brother’s heel, the one who is born second, the one who symbolizes deceit, the one whose name already dictates the expectations and obligations surrounding him and how others will perceive him. To the God who let him be born defined-as-inferior into all this baggage of being blessed for who he was supposed to be, Jacob says… bless me.  The book of Genesis oozes irony – the actual meaning of the name given to the Son of Promise; it’s not “laughter,” it’s “He laughs,” because He is laughing at the hopeless laughter of the crushed barren old woman who saw only deceit in His promises until now. So the ironically-nameless wrestler who just begged to be released says, “What is your name?” This time – unlike the last time he asked for a blessing – Jacob says, “Jacob.” And God gives him a new name that places him relative to God: “God’s Prince.”

                Until last year I even felt dissociated from my name, “Tabitha.” I used to introduce myself to people and wonder who “Tabitha” was. I didn’t feel related to her. I didn’t feel the name described me. Isn’t that odd? I think it’s because I felt that I could never/would never live up to what my name stood for.  I don’t know what I would have felt described me, but things I thought were implied by my name – strongly Biblical, or traditional, or conservative, or a some old TV show about a witch, or a calico cat – didn’t describe me at all. Maybe I split my sense of identity from my name to avoid feeling described by the ideas and expectations I thought my name would evoke from people. It’s getting better, but even now sometimes when I say my name I have that odd feeling that I don’t know who that “Tabitha” is, but she certainly doesn’t live here.

                So the truth is that I’ve been haunted by what Erikson would term failed navigation of a developmental stage I should have resolved at least 6 years ago. On the individual level - could I own my name? On the collective level - would I belong anywhere, with anybody, if my name belonged to me? In my head I am angry and overwhelmed and empty and wanting. And my plane is delayed 15 minutes. I guess I’d rather have us both delayed and safe than timely and compromised.  And I have left Africa and poorly bonded to America, and not everything is resolved. So can I be at uneasy peace with some active irresolution, some strings left untied forever, with the small death of goodbye, being part of the mystery waiting for identity behind the name “Tabitha” – as long as it is going somewhere, healing something, germinating? Because with all the activity inside me, it feels like it might be.

                I’ve got to go. We’re boarding. 

                Sai enjima,

                Tabitha